432 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



venient to define what I mean by its contrast with a 

 habit of thought which prevailed in the first half of the 

 nineteenth century, mainly, but not solely, under the 

 influence of the scientific spirit. This latter tendency 

 may be defined by calling it the atomising tendency of 

 thought. 



Great progress had been made in the course of the 

 eighteenth century by a division of scientific labour, by 

 a process of isolation of special problems, by studying 

 such things and phenomena in the world of nature and 

 of mind as could be neatly separated and defined. 

 Thus, physical astronomy and mechanical physics had 

 made enormous strides through the treatment of the 

 single property of gravitation or of attraction. Follow- 

 ing upon astronomy, chemistry had become an exact 

 science through being founded by Lavoisier upon the 

 property of weight, and subsequently upon that of the 

 atomic weights of a limited number of elements and 

 their combination in fixed proportions. Other sciences 

 followed with the study of definite and distinct pro- 

 perties or species of things natural, such as the forms of 

 crystals or the types of animated beings. A similar 

 process of isolation was at work in some of the mental 

 sciences — e.g., in the earlier " faculty-psychology " as 

 well as in the later doctrine of the " association of 



need no synthesis but only a 

 synopsis. We need only to look 

 and see what is contained in the 

 material that comes before us. 

 . . . When we recognise that 

 atomism is untrue from the out- 

 set, we recognise that order is 

 involved in our experience all the 

 way through. The term ' order ' 

 seems to me on the whole the most 



satisfactory that we can use to 

 cover all the modes of unity that 

 are contained in our experience. 

 . . . No doubt there is a good 

 deal of difference between different 

 types of order, . . . but they are 

 all alike as being the modes in 

 which the plurality of the content 

 of our experience reveals itself as 

 being at the same time a unity." 



